Tag Archives: Soviet repressions

On 3 June 1988, the newspaper Litaratura i mastactva published the article written by Zianon Paźniak titled Kurapaty, the road of death (Курапаты – дарога смерці).

For the first time, the article told the story of mass shootings by Soviet secret police in the forest of Kurapaty near Minsk.

The article ignited mass interest towards the topic of Communist terror in the Belarusian society. It became a starting point for the awakening of the Belarusian society in the late 1980s – very soon, the people demanded democratic reforms and, eventually, the restoration of the independence of Belarus from the Soviet Union.

In October that year, the Belarusian Popular Front was established – the movement that became the key driving force of the restoration of Belarusian independence in 1991.

On the occasion of Dziady, which since the 1980ies has become not only the traditional day when Belarusians commemorate their ancestors but also a memorial day for the victims of political repressions in Belarus, the Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic in Exile calls for all Belarusians to pay homage to the hundreds of thousands of our compatriots who became victims of repressions and social experiments under the foreign-imposed totalitarian Soviet regime, which dominated Belarus for the most part of the 20th century.

Presentation by Ivonka Survilla, President of the Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic in Exile, at the international conference European Conscience and Communism in the Senate of the Parliament of Czech Republic, Prague, 2-3 June 2008

I have the honour to be the sixth president in exile of the Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic. The BNR Rada is the longest-living government in exile. It left Belarus close to 90 years ago because of the aggression and the subsequent occupation of our independent state by our communist neighbour.

Communism can be examined according to its large scale, long-term impact on the lives of individual human beings and also according to the impact on the appropriated nations, nations that do not define the political and cultural epicentre of communist power, but rather find themselves in forced subjugation. This is the reality and legacy of the communist experience, felt by many nations in modern times, evidenced by Tibet’s real-time struggle and by countries like Belarus who continue to experience the fallout of the Soviet experience.